A Time of Automotive Glasnost?

A look at Russia's push for automobility and its liberating effect.

Is it possible that an utterly American tradition—our love affair with the automobile—is translating in a big way into Cyrillic characters? Several things I've read recently suggest that personal mobility is causing major changes in Russian society, almost a road-going Velvet Revolution.

Not Exactly a Car in Every Garage, But Growing... Personal mobility had never been a high priority of Soviet planners, philosophically or practically. Trucks, yes; automobiles, no, unless it was cars intended for apparatchiks of government officialdom—paradoxically, usually chauffeur-driven. Lada, Moskvich and other home-market offerings were mere aspirations for most Russians. Exemplary of this, Queen of the Gas Pump was both a 1963 movie in a Russian Cinderella vein as well as a 1974 oil painting of the Socialist Realism genre. And then the Soviet Union disintegrated in 1991.

By the first half of 2008, Russia briefly became Europe's largest car market, 1.65 million new sales edging out Germany's 1.63 million. Curiously, Russian brands made up only a quarter of these. The most popular cars were the and Chevrolet Lacetti; the latter, a B-class sedan of Daewoo origin, some of them assembled by GM partner Avtotor in Kaliningrad. GM also opened its first fully owned Russian factory, in St. Petersburg, late in 2008.

All this got toned down by the world recession. A drop in the ruble's value by a third hurt the imports. Also, the Kremlin's Rubles-for-Wrecks (my name, not theirs...) is to offer 50,000 rubles (around $1700) on trade-ins at least 10 years old—but only for purchases of Russian-made cars.

Used cars are a big deal there as well. from the west are highly prized. In the country's eastern regions, relatively pristine Japanese used cars are popular (after prohibitively costly inspection renewals encourage their homeland turnover).

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The Shcherbinsky Imperative With personal mobility comes a sense of personal choice, of personal rights, or so it seems in a tale I'll call the Shcherbinsky Imperative. (Purely as an aside, did you know there is a Cyrillic character pronounced "shch"?)

Back in 2005, Siberian railroad worker Oleg Shcherbinsky and his family were motoring along in their secondhand when it got sideswiped by a chauffeur-driven Mercedes in which traveled the Altai regional governor, a well-liked fellow known as "the Schwarzenegger of Siberia."

Alas, the governor and his driver both perished in the crash. Yet, despite the latter's clearly being at fault, it was Shcherbinsky who was sentenced to four years in a labor colony for precipitating the accident.

Another Russian paradox: Officials are permitted a flashing blue light on their cars, and other drivers are supposed to give way.

The incident became a cause célèbre, the larger question being whether officials should be permitted to flaunt traffic rules. Motorists throughout the country flew white ribbons in solidarity.

A second trial was held. Shcherbinsky gained acquittal, seen as a turning point in Russian society. Said a political commentator: "...ordinary people can defeat the authorities in a battle for their rights. This is one of the most important precedents in recent Russian history."

Tea Parties and Car Taxes Late last year, the country's ruling party, United Russia, unanimously approved what was essentially a doubling of car-owner taxes.

Through websites, newspapers and other media, it quickly became clear that Russian motorists had the numbers and expertise to argue their point. From The New York Times: "Just when it looked like politics had disappeared, a vociferous new class won't stop blaring its horn."

Such was the outcry that within a week President Dmitry Medvedev intervened and blocked the bill.

The Bad Old Days An entertaining—and detailed!—overview of the bad old days is given in Cars for Comrades, The Life of the Soviet Automobile, by Lewis H. Siegelbaum, Cornell University Press, Ithaca & London, 2008. (Amazon.com has it for $31.96.)

As you might guess, service stations were—and are—few and far between; repair shops, even rarer. As with so much of Russian life, this gave rise to a "second economy" of bartering and quid pro quo deals. Siegelbaum suggests that "cars, cars, and more cars seem to have played a particularly large and invidious role in popular disillusionment with Soviet socialism."

River Rouge = Red River? A neat tidbit from Cars for Comrades: As part of the vast River Rouge complex in Dearborn, Michigan, Henry Ford set up the Rouge Steel Company to provide flat-rolled products of high quality for his car production. Some 80 years later in 2003, Rouge Steel, the fifth-largest producer in the U.S., was acquired by OAO Severstal, Russia's largest. "Thus did a Russian company that had emerged from the state-owned steel industry of the former Soviet Union purchase one of the former jewels in Ford's crown."

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